Best Friends, 4ever
by Green3
Summary: Dawn at age ten. Except it never really happened, did it?


Title: Best Friends, 4-ever  
  
Author: Green  
  
Rating: PG-13  
  
Characters: Dawn, no pairing.  
  
Summary: Dawn at age ten, except it never really happened, did it?  
  
Author's Note: Dawn would have actually been nine, but I thought ten sounded better. Eleven would have been pushing it, even though it would have worked the best. Thank you to Cerdd Gwen for the beta job. And also... forgive the strange formatting, ff.net didn't want to take my coded version OR format my .txt file correctly.   
  
Archive: If you want it, just let me know where it's going.   
  
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters or story of BtVS.   
  
Feedback: Please!! beingagreenmother@yahoo.com or here at ff.net  
***  
.  
When Dawn was ten, her teeth were too big for her face. She knew this because every time she passed a mirror or a pane of glass, she would look and study herself, and her teeth always seemed to just *be there*. Sometimes when she was out with her mother she would stop in the middle of the sidewalk and stare at her reflection in a store front window. Her mother would smile indulgently, but her sister would roll her eyes and make deep aggravated sighs.  
.  
"Mom," Buffy would whine. "Mom, she's doing it again."  
.  
Buffy never had to worry about her teeth being too big for her face. Buffy didn't have gangly, too-long legs and hair that was too fine and straight to hold a curl. Buffy was perfect. She had dozens of friends and even more admirers. Buffy was a cheerleader and a homecoming queen. She got to pick out her own clothes and she could go out on dates. In fact, the same day that her mom and dad had given her permission to start dating, she'd filled up her weekends for three straight months. The phone calls hadn't stopped since.  
.  
Dawn only had two friends, though, but they were her *best* friends. The three of them -- Pamela, Jennifer, and Dawn -- in a burst of creative originality, dubbed themselves the Three Musketeers. Buffy would scoff and either sarcastically call them the Three Muskrats or ask them where their muskets were (which didn't make any sense to Dawn, because she didn't know what a musket was and wasn't Three Musketeers a candy bar?).  
.  
Pamela and Jennifer were twins, but not identical, and unless you were told, you would have no idea that they were sisters. They were two years older than Dawn, and at twelve years old seemed so cool and mature and sophisticated, especially compared to *her*. When they first became friends back when Dawn was eight, they told her that they could hang out with her because she was tall for her age, and she looked like she was ten, just like them. Dawn loved them from that moment on.  
.  
The girls were vastly different in appearance, a fact that continued to awe Dawn even though she was used to them. They were *twins* after all, but they didn't even look related. Pamela had a little, pert nose, actual visible breasts, and straight brown hair like Dawn's, except hers wasn't as fine, and right after her twelfth birthday she had it cut short into layers like Rachel's on Friends, and it didn't look like Dawn's hair anymore. Jennifer's hair was blonde and fine and hung in midlength limp curls. She wore glasses and had a wide, flat nose and snorted like a pig when she laughed. Jennifer was the best friend Dawn had ever had.  
.  
The Three Musketeers went to the mall together every Saturday. Their parents would drop them off with warnings about strange men and staying together and for God's sake, don't break anything unless you want your allowance to suffer for a year.  
.  
The girls would walk, most times arm in arm, giggling at their fellow mall goers with their heads close together. They would go into the novelty shop and giggle some more at silly little items like hats that lit up, proclaiming that the wearer prayed to the god of beer and pretzels, or they would exclaim over the shelf that held such items as strawberry and peach whipped cream and small canisters of chocolate-cherry flavored edible panties, until the sales clerk shooed them away from the "adult items".  
.  
The three had a mall itinerary -- they always visited KB Toys first, then the bookstore (where they would sit on the floor and ooh and ahh at the boy heartthrobs in Bop and Teen Beat magazines), then the novelty shop. When they left (or were chased out of) the novelty shop, they would have finally gathered enough courage to enter Victoria's Secret, where the salesgirls would smile their knowing smiles and let them browse undisturbed. Sometimes they would get a stern throat clearing from a manager if they messed up a shelf of carefully folded satin panties, and they would run out, holding hands and laughing all the way to the music store.  
.  
A favorite thing to do on a Saturday was to listen to music at Sam Goody through the headphone sets. The girls would stand together, three adolescents on the verge of something big and wonderful and unknown, sighing over the boyishly sexy voices of their favorite pop stars.   
.  
Sometimes they didn't do any of that, however, and instead spent their day huddled together on the floor of the ladies restroom. Like the day after the twins' grandmother had a funeral, and Dawn had sat with them while they cried, not knowing what to say but hugging them and stroking their hair and crying with them, because her friends were hurting and so she hurt too.  
.  
Then there was the day that perfect, perfect Buffy started having delusions and had to go away, and left her parents behind to yell at each other and to slam doors and ignore the little sister that felt completely lost and alone without Buffy.  
.  
That Saturday was spent sitting cross-legged in the bathroom, quietly shredding rolls of toilet tissue, and then later sitting quietly in the food court sucking down homemade lemonade through bright and cheery multicolored straws.  
.  
The worst day, however, wasn't the day that Buffy came home covered in blood and dirt and green, snotlike goo and swore that if Dawn told she would strangle her until she was deader than Kurt Cobain. It wasn't the day that Dawn's dad moved out after sitting down and explaining that even though he and their mother were divorcing, he would always be their father, and he would always love his girls, and he would always, *always* be a part of their lives.  
.  
No, the worst was the day when Dawn told Pamela and Jennifer that her mom and her sister and she were moving to some town called Sunnydale. The three girls held each other on the floor of the ladies restroom in the Wild Palm Commons Mall and cried from the time they were dropped off at ten AM until their moms came to pick them up at two.  
.  
***  
.  
When Dawn found out, at the age of fifteen, that she was a Key with monk manufactured memories, being pursued by a hellgod for some unknown, devious reason, she called the number that was etched into her brain -- the same phone number that she used to call every Friday night to set up a time and place to meet the next day at the mall.  
.  
The phone rang on the other end of the line, and an unfamiliar elderly male voice answered.  
.  
"Is Pamela there?" she asked, "Or Jennifer?"  
.  
"Sorry, you have the wrong number," the man said.  
.  
"Is this 742-7620?"  
.  
"Yes it is."  
.  
A beat. Cold dread washed over her.  
.  
"How long have you had this number?" she asked, her voice flat.  
.  
"A good twenty five years, Miss," came the answer.  
.  
. . .   
.  
"Miss?"  
.  
  
.  
  
.  
The End 


End file.
